Excursions

February 23, 2007 4:13 AM

We're all familiar with the works of outsider artist Henry Darger and the like, but how many talented madmen like Darger live among us, unnoticed by society at large? Also, how many of these broken but artistic souls have access to the internet, and can there be any artistic merit found in works such as the utterly abominable Excursions into Madness?
posted by ELF Radio (15 comments total)

let me see if I understand this...

this is a link to a deviantart page, which only contains what seems to me to be some random bits of kind of laughably poorly written ultra violent and scatalogical prose. But more than that, it's a deviant art page that was created only one hour before this post was made, which isn't even enough time to read the whole thing. I mean, is the dude a personal friend of yours? wtf is this post?

If I'm completely misunderstanding the nature of this post, please alert me, but something smells fishy.
posted by shmegegge at 4:31 AM on February 23, 2007

no
posted by pyramid termite at 4:31 AM on February 23, 2007

For my next excursion I will be going to the store for some purple nail varnish and a can of Slim Fast.
posted by fire&wings at 4:38 AM on February 23, 2007

Shmegegge,

Read a bit closer -- that page has been in existence since July 28th, 2004.

He is not a personal friend of mine, but rather a patient of my uncle Charles, who works with mentally ill people. He is fascinated by some of his patients, who are completely familiar with the internet and other computer-related things, but cannot survive in the regular world.
posted by ELF Radio at 4:39 AM on February 23, 2007

ELF Radio, it's not the deviantart user page I'm talking about, but rather the excursions into madness page which, at the time I type this comment, says it was submitted 1 hour and 34 minutes ago and has only ever been viewed 62 times.
posted by shmegegge at 4:45 AM on February 23, 2007

ELF Radio's profile points to their Deviantart page where they talk about something called a "Shego" with their drawing of a green one. The email address on the page linked in the FPP is green_shego@. That, and the fact the piece of writing has been online for an hour, will do me.
posted by fire&wings at 4:48 AM on February 23, 2007

I was in the writing lab when this woman approached. She was running the lab, wearing a white shirt, a short cut of hair, and a gigantic ass. She said she wanted to touch my area. I refused so she bent over, exposing a pulsating hole that was laced with large throbbing veins. A tried to take cover but a hot blast of diarrhea erupted from the hole, coating my computer and my books. At least I could taste the pizzeria combos she had eaten so it wasn’t entirely bad.

I hate it when that happens.
posted by jason's_planet at 5:02 AM on February 23, 2007

you know, i really would have liked a genuine well made post about the possibility of outsider art being prevalent on the internet.
posted by shmegegge at 5:08 AM on February 23, 2007

i think fire&wings has made a good case here that this page is either ELF Radio, or someone he knows

more importantly, it's someone i daresay we DON'T want to know ... the name of the site is metafilter not metafreakshow ... if these are your uncle's patients, then you're exposing people who "can't survive in the real world" to ridicule and revulsion ... furthermore the whole thing reeks of passive/aggressive art damage

and william s burroughs did it light years better than this person is capable of dreaming ...

this sucks ... it is the black hole of suck ... it is the primal source of suck on the internet today and if it is allowed to remain here it will slowly draw in all of the internet in a huge sucking sound, slow and sadistic, until all that is left is an infinitely small point of suck that will out-weigh the mass of the entire universe ... no light, no heat, and no intelligence will escape

the fate of the internet, humanity and the universe is in matt's hands ... this link MUST go
posted by pyramid termite at 5:18 AM on February 23, 2007

Peculiarly, I found "The New King: Part A" to be an adequate piece of short-short horror fiction. I'd publish it. It seems oddly out of place among the diarrhea stories.
posted by Faint of Butt at 5:19 AM on February 23, 2007

I could have done without that excerpt right after breakfast...

I won't even click on the link. It strikes me wrong that you would expose your uncle's patient that way.
posted by konolia at 5:31 AM on February 23, 2007

Just sneaking in before the banhammer to say that it's an ill wind that etc and so forth: Because of this post, I finally read about Darger.

Also, I always get William S Burroughs and Edgar Rice Burroughs mixed up. That is, on the basis of their names and the fact that both were (apparently) fantastical artists of some kind. I've never read/viewed anything by either.
posted by DU at 5:32 AM on February 23, 2007

On the one hand, this post got me to place a documentary about Darger, who is genuinely interesting, on my rentals queue. And it's also actually helped some ideas I've been having about short stories to gel in my mind.

On the other hand, "Excursions into Madness" is prima facie revolting and reveals little but a fondness for shit and a tendency to write it down. It doesn't even have a commentary on the world from a disturbed point of view (as Darger's work certainly did); it's just obsession with bodily functions on display. I can see that there might be cases that are on the fine line between art and grotesquerie; this is not one of them.
posted by graymouser at 5:37 AM on February 23, 2007

I am often on the lookout for nice 19th century paintings. They could come from the odd antique store, ebay, an auction house, or a nicely published catalog. I have had to learn the sad lesson that even though it's old, it's not necessarily any good. A sloppy, self-congratulating dauber from 1872 could waste canvas and board too. I find this..."work" similar. Henry Darger. Not close in a 1000 years. Ever.

However, I don't want to post this as a "strong reaction," because it is not. It is the sound of dropping that dusty thing back into the pile, walking out the door, and wondering why I filled the meter up with 3 quarters like I was going to find something. Waste.
posted by wallstreet1929 at 5:43 AM on February 23, 2007

he's a patient of my uncle Charles

that's a new one.
posted by johnny novak at 5:50 AM on February 23, 2007